Fog was his ally, but the rain was his best friend. It was 10 P.M. and drizzling, so Elden Kidd knew there would be nobody on the Tijuana beach to watch them leave: no bad guys, no policía. The rain shrouded them as they pulled on their wet suits, discarding their clothes on the sand and heading into the surf; it muffleed the tiny noises they made—the frightened gasps of the two Chinese teenage girls clinging to the boogie boards as the first waves reared up and smashed over them, the sound of Elden's fins slicing the water as he headed out beyond the surf break. The colored lights from Tijuana's dance clubs began to shimmer, then blur. The frenetic thumping of the bass line carried across the dark water like someone breathlessly chasing them. Soon that, too, would fade.

Elden lay on his back, kicking steadily, a tow rope wrapped around his shoulder linking him to the girls. Every six seconds the beam from Tijuana's lighthouse pierced the dark and the drizzle, and he used the light as a reference point. First they headed straight out into the Pacific, paddling several hundred yards to get as far as possible from the rusting border fence that sloped down into the beach—an area closely surveilled by U.S. Border Patrol—and then they could finally turn and plow their way north, the girls' destination all along.

Elden had begun smuggling people across the border five years earlier, in 1989. In a business run almost entirely by Mexicans, he was this clean-cut Mormon from California who barely spoke Spanish—the American Coyote. Mostly he took Mexicans, but when his satisfied customers found kitchen jobs in Chinese restaurants, Elden's reputation spread. He had shuttled people across the border dozens upon dozens of times, and always he was impressed by the bravery he saw: farmers and factory workers following him at a crouch along the ragged bottom of a gully, grandmas and children wading a cold river toward a night-shrouded shore.

On this night, the rain, cool and sweet-tasting, sluiced off his Vaseline-smeared face. Elden kept his ears tuned to the waves breaking on his left. If the sound grew too loud, he was drifting too close to shore; if it began to fade, they were heading farther out to sea. It would be five hours before they would come ashore at Imperial Beach in California. Until then, they were alone with the thick churn of the ocean, the velvety depths, the dark and the rain curtaining them off. The girls began singing softly to each other.

Besides providing the two kids with dark-colored life jackets and boogie boards, Elden had fastened duck decoys on their heads, so if anyone would happen to spot them on a moonless night, in the rain, hundreds of yards from shore, they would see only a couple of ducks bobbing on the ocean surface. It had taken the girls three weeks to get this far, and this was the last leg of their journey, his leg, at $5,000 a head. They'd never been in an ocean before, didn't even know how to swim. It had helped that the people who had brought the girls to him—they rendezvoused at a little bike shop in Tijuana—had told them Elden had supernatural powers, that this American had never failed to get people across. And the look of him had only bolstered the myth: six feet three, 270 pounds, a tanned and muscular giant with a pleasantly white-toothed grin. As soon as the girls had seen him, they left the side of their Chinese-Mexican handler and came to him, hugging his brawny arms, clinging to him like delicate vines.

After an hour or so in the cold swells, the girls began to ask, “Meiguo?” The word for America that translated to “beautiful country.” All he could do was point up ahead in the distance, over the black water, at a cluster of white haloed lights that marked Imperial Beach. Time crawled. Or sped. Lost its shape altogether out here. Had another hour passed? Less? Impossible to tell.

Finally, they came ashore at 3 a.m. They dug up the plastic bag of clothes he had stashed in the sand, buried their wet suits, threw their life jackets into the surf, and hurried to the motel room that Elden had booked. There, the girls jumped into a hot shower and stayed for 40 minutes while Elden sat wrapped in a bedspread, shivering and waiting his turn. His throat was raw from all the salt water, his ankles and calves throbbed, he was physically spent, his body tugging him down into the sweet molasses of sleep. But elation is what he felt—he was almost goofy with it.

These days, Elden is still an impressively large man, thick-necked and bear-pawed. I first met him in a pancake house in Riverside, California. He had his second wife and her two kids with him, his pride and joy. He didn't walk so much as surge and shamble. Even though he's 62, it's not hard to imagine that he'd once shepherded scores of people across the border, becoming a legend in a time and place now long gone. He'd created dozens of routes and perfected an endless array of ploys, cover stories, costumes, and props—all products of a profoundly devious and clever mind.

A lot has changed since Elden prowled the border—though, to listen to Donald Trump, you'd never know it. A cornerstone of his campaign for the presidency is to build a wall to save America, and so, naturally, he doesn't mention that much of it—some 700 once porous miles—is already sealed off. Nor does he mention that more Mexicans leave the U.S. today than enter it. Today, the wild and untamed border—an unruly netherworld where hordes of Mexicans pour into our country—exists mostly in Trump's mind.

But once upon a time, before 9/11, in an era that now seems innocent and free, the border was a stranger, more chaotic place. And in those days, Elden felt fireproof. He had married at 22, and he and his wife settled in Riverside, California, and began having babies. Providing for his family was Elden's high holy cause, his “earthly mission,” as he says, a calling that made him feel both invincible and free to do whatever it took, however risky, underhanded, or illegal.

Then, as now, the politics of the border—the legalities of immigration—didn't much concern him. This was about making money. If Elden had a flag, it would be for his family. He was an adventurer, a restless, ready soul. Human smuggling married so many parts of his personality—his athleticism, his wiliness, the rebellious prankster and the defender of the underdog. As his ex-wife says, with both appreciation and pain, “he's the freest man I know.”

Back when Elden first started, hundreds of people would storm the stretch of border near Tijuana every night, swarming the outmanned Border Patrol agents stationed there. “It was as simple as ducking under a fence in those days,” Elden says. Some nights, all it took was Elden hanging out near the Tijuana River with a rubber raft; when immigrants reached the water, he would ferry them across at $25 a head.

Sometimes Elden would be joined by his buddy Tim Burraston, a surfer and carpenter he'd met while leading white-water-rafting trips in the U.S. and Mexico, along the Guatemalan border. When the river was running full, the two were in their glory. The going price for taking someone all the way from Tijuana to Los Angeles was only $250. “A thousand-dollar night was a home run,” Tim recalls.

Things would change when, in 1994, President Bill Clinton launched Operation Gatekeeper, intensifying security on the most heavily trafficked section of the border—the six westernmost miles. Reassigned agents flooded the area, armed with infrared telescopes and encrypted radios. Lines of double fencing were built and high-powered stadium lighting installed. Crossing the border became a lot more difficult, but being a smuggler became a lot more lucrative. Elden began to charge $1,800 a head for Mexicans and $5,000 for Chinese immigrants, a riskier bunch to take across because they were undocumented on both sides of the border. (But children always traveled for free; nothing made Elden happier than ferrying a child or a baby.)

As the preferred crossing routes shifted away from the heavily policed sections of the border and toward much more treacherous terrain, many more immigrants began to die during the passage. And although no one ever died on Elden's watch, the routes demanded more complex—and inventive—schemes. Case in point: One Christmas Eve, he crossed six young men over the border and into California, dressed them in Santa Claus suits he had purchased at Big Lots, gave them bicycles, then sent them north, through an area often patrolled by border police. Or during pheasant-hunting season? He put them in hunting vests and handed out BB guns.

Of course, avoiding the cops altogether was always preferable, and for this, Elden figured he could use a little intel. So, one day he approached an agent in Yuma, Arizona, introduced himself as a Boy Scouts leader, and said he was bringing a bunch of scouts camping there next weekend and he knew the boys would love to be able to tune in to the agents' activities and cheer them on. Would the agent be kind enough to share the call signs they used on their radios? Sure. After that, Elden could easily listen in, and if cops spotted him heading into Mexico (“Looks like we got a guy on a taco run…”), he would turn around, hunker down, and try again later.

If elusiveness failed him, he resorted to quick thinking. Once, when Elden was discovered by Mexican police, he let the cops chase him into the bottom of Smuggler's Gulch, where he promptly clutched his chest and fell to the ground. Four cops labored to drag him out of the 180-foot-deep canyon—270 pounds of dead weight—and then when they reached the high ground, Elden leapt to his feet and took off down the slope again. The officers were just too exhausted to follow.

“October 11 1994. To my great misfortune my life has changed completely. I'm being held against my will in the Federal Prison in Toluca Mexico.… My heart is broken. I feel as if I am already dead and this place is my tomb.” That is how Elden's prison journal began. At the time, he had no way of knowing that he was facing a two-year ordeal that would make him harder, humbler, quicker with his fists—and, ultimately, a much better criminal.

Elden was arrested for smuggling in Toluca, 40 miles west of Mexico City—he wasn't moving people, a crime he had committed many times, but rather marijuana, which police found hidden beneath the floorboards of a motor home he was driving. He'd been hired by a wealthy Mexican-American mango grower to drive the motor home down into south-central Mexico for a large family gathering, take a few days off while they partied, and then drive the motor home back to the States. This was the third such trip Elden had taken for the man. He claims he had no idea he was being used as a mule. “Back then I was still a serious Mormon, and marijuana was the devil,” he says.

After his arrest, Elden was transported to a prison in central Mexico called Almoloya de Juárez. Elden's cell block contained 250 men; he was the only American.

At first, Elden had no interest in friends or alliances; he didn't belong here. He had only one aim: to survive this hell until he could find a way out. “I dream of escape every night, but there is no way. 10 guard toweres maned by two men each with rifles. High grey walls topped by spools of razor wire. Doors, gates, bars... May God help me and my family.”

The mornings were god-awful. He woke to the sounds of phlegmy coughing, water sloshing in buckets, mops clanking, the first garbled cries and shouts of a language not his own. Twice a day, he was fed from a barrel filled with rice and beans or some unidentifiable stew. “This was a rough day. The food was horrible. Horse teeth in the soup pot,” he wrote that October. He quickly began to lose weight.

Other prisoners tormented Elden, throwing rocks or bread rolls at him when he was in the yard. “Got in a short fight with a guy who attacked me with a heavy pipe. Put him down instantly.” Elden spent hours outdoors in a distant corner of the yard, reading and watching the sky. He noted snowy egrets and kestrels, flycatchers and blackbirds. And he tried to forget the headaches, colds, hives, and badly abscessed tooth that plagued him. His skin became gray.

Still, he jogged in the yard and lifted buckets of water, buckets of rocks. He easily won a prison-wide arm-wrestling contest. By the spring, some prisoners were glomming on to him for protection: An old man who was too afraid